


The Deceit of Delusion

by yuzuki_chan



Series: The Cases of Marshalwitch Hermione Granger [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: But things are not what they seem, Deception, Draco needs answers, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Hermione is relentless in the pursuit of truth, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery, Post-Hogwarts, Psychological Drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-03
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 16:33:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9557318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuzuki_chan/pseuds/yuzuki_chan
Summary: Investigator Chief Marshalwitch Hermione Granger never expected to be put on suspension. And she definitely never thought she would be confronted with a case during her suspension that she couldn’t walk away from, even if it was brought to her by Draco Malfoy.





	1. Discovery: Receipt of Allegation and Mandate to Investigate

It was raining. 

Hermione rolled her eyes at her rather obvious observation and turned back to her filing. 

After being put on suspension with pay by her Commander—correction: forced to 'take a vacation, on the Department' to clear her head—Hermione had taken to organising her old case notes. A voluminous task, to be sure, and one she thought was a complete waste of her time. She hardly deserved to be sitting at home surrounded by years of backlogged parchment when she could otherwise be out with the rest of her brigade bringing in the latest suspect for last week's murder. A dock in her pay would have been more than sufficient, she thought. A suspension was just harsh. 

So maybe she shouldn't have hexed the arsehole's bollocks to actually sod himself, maybe that had in fact been one spell too many, but he really had deserved it. Honestly, what kind of inconsiderate, self-involved, pig-headed git could tell the whole office to take it easy on his girlfriend because he's breaking up with her, before he’s actually told her himself? The kind that deserved electric-blue hair, Dungbomb breath and octopus suckers jinxed all over him. In retrospect though, she really should have stopped there. 

Commander Dankworth had assured her that the Department of Magical Law Enforcement could live without her for eight weeks, but she wasn't sure she could live without it. That she had accrued over eight weeks of vacation time probably should have been a small indication of why her boss pushed her out of the office, or why her relationship had imploded, but Hermione wasn't feeling particularly rational. Day two, and she was just narked that her access to the duelling range had been revoked. She had 54 days to get back to rational.

Until then, Investigator Chief Marshalwitch Hermione Granger was off her cases.

She had just started to get back in the flow of filing when her proximity alarm charms sounded. Hermione huffed and waited for whomever it was to knock on her front door. Unless it was one of the Junior Reeves she'd convinced to bring her cold cases from the Department archives, she was going to hex the nuisance's hair off. 

The knocking never came, though, and Hermione's Investigator instincts kicked in. She grabbed her wand. 

_Homenum Revelio_ ; always clear the room. 

One person – wizard, 6-foot, 12-stone – outside the door. Armed, but inactive. He was just standing there, and while she was sure an otherwise malicious assailant would have made his move by now, it didn't make things any less disconcerting. 

Spells at the ready, wand arm free, line-of-sight. 

Her hand tightened around her wand as the spell-smoke image of the man behind the door raised his hand. Before he could rap his knuckles on the wood, Hermione opened the door and trained her wand to his chest.

‘Who are—Malfoy!’

He looked like a drowned, albino rat: his clothes were sopping, puddling water on the veranda, and his skin was whiter than the smoke version of him her spell had created. The platinum-blond hair, typically so meticulously pristine, was plastered to his head, covering his eyes.

Hermione assessed the possible threat, but Malfoy's wand wasn't in his hand and, to be honest, she'd wager he would fall over if she exhaled too hard. He posed a negligible threat at best, but that was all Malfoy had always been in her mind. And Harry always warned her to consider the prat more seriously; so, just for Harry, Hermione kept her wand level.

‘What are you doing here? This is my home, you cannot just show up without Flo—’

‘What's it like being a Mudblood?’

She was hexing his hair off. 

‘What did you say?’

‘What's it like being a Mu… being Muggle-born?’

Effort; oh, that was nice for a change. Not good enough. The eyebrows were going, too.

Hermione focused on the face she was about to curse, and she caught Malfoy's eyes. They were red-rimmed and bloodshot. Had he been jinxed already? Conjunctivitis Curse? It almost looked as if he had been… crying? With the rain flowing down his face she couldn't tell, but Hermione hadn't seen eyes that red on anyone since Fred died. 

Then Malfoy's legs gave way. Before she even thought to react, her instincts took over and she grabbed him, sliding down to the threshold with him. 

Malfoy was trembling, cold, and making a wet mess of her foyer. Her wand was still in her hand, but she was practically pinned to the ground by his dead weight. Immediately, Hermione thought to signal St Mungo's Emergency Medical Squad, but she could feel him breathing. Then she smelt the booze on his breath. 

For the second time that evening, Hermione huffed and rolled her eyes. Bloody fantastic. She charmed them both dry and Mobilcorpus'd him to the couch, spelling her case notes into the corner—unorganised—as she got up from the floor. So much for the filing. 

If he had interrupted her for some childish taunting because he'd got too pissed to remember what year it was, she was going to remove every follicle of hair from his body with that new waxing spell Ginny taught her.

And then Investigator Granger's vacation would likely be extended.

So instead Hermione went to make some tea.

***

‘Alright, time to wake up. I need my sofa back.’

Hermione poked her uninvited guest in the ribs with the handle of her wand. This inconvenience had gone on long enough. All of her Floos to Malfoy Manor had gone unanswered, and her owl had returned empty. She was beginning to get desperate. Even Nott and Parkinson's names were coming to mind as potentially useful and that was not a road she was willing to go down. 

_Sonorus_ it was, then. ‘Malfoy!’

That did it. He jolted awake, upsetting Crookshanks who had been lounging on his chest. She hoped he had been scratched as the cat darted away, but the mass of orange fur stuck to Malfoy's black robes was enough to make her smile at least. 

‘Sugar?’

Hermione watched as he gaped with bulging eyes at her, coy smile on her face, until he noticed she was holding a tea pot. Well, that was fun. Malfoy nodded smartly, eyes still wide, as he looked around in disbelief, clearly not understanding where he was or why. 

‘How—’

‘Out of pure civility I am offering you a cuppa, and then you're going to leave. I need my living room back to look through these cases.’

She handed him his tea and saucer, and turned back to the files she had been reviewing. Reeve Gastrell had brought her a box of cold cases whilst Malfoy was passed out. Hermione had decided to start with the worst: triple homicide, originally a suspected double murder-suicide by a Wizard against his wife and eight-year-old son, but defensive spell-scars were found on the wizard in question. 

Photos of dead bodies, with the jumping shadows of Investigators moving out of frame, littered the floor. Parchments of case notes and interview transcripts were stacked in piles that would have made little sense to anyone other than their organiser. Hovering above the mess of case records were three arrest photographs of incarcerated wizards, each connected by a different colour energy string. 

Caught by a moment of clarity, Hermione crouched down to the floor and pulled together pieces of parchment from different stacks. Forgetting Malfoy was even in the room, she swished her wand and more photos levitated in front of her, joining the ones already there, creating a rainbow web of links. Absentmindedly, she refilled her tumbler with the whiskey bottle from her liquor cabinet but didn't float the bottle back. 

She simply downed the amber liquid in one swig and poured herself another. 

‘You drink like a man, Granger.’

‘I drink like an Investigator,’ she retorted, not looking away from the mug shots in front of her. ‘Most men pale in comparison to how pissed I can get.’ For emphasis, she finished the drink in her hand. 

But Malfoy was far from the forefront of her mind. Hermione had already started piecing things together in the Edevane case, and while she could spare thought for pointless banter, she was truly focusing on which of Erskine Edevane's former associates had the deepest grudge. 

She picked up St Mungo's post-mortem reports and pinned them to the air alongside the photos. Perimortem spell-scars were evident on his chest and wand-hand, typical evidence of self-defence. St Mungo's had narrowed it down to fire-based attack curses, which were a favourite of two potential subjects. Both were in Azkaban at the time, though. Perhaps—

‘Why do you do it to yourself?’

Hermione paused, her hand still stretched out in the air, and blinked. Her train of thought was gone. She took a deep breath and, glad her wand was still on the floor, turned to face Malfoy with her hand on her hip.

He wasn't looking at her though. Malfoy's eyes were darting from each criminal's photo to the bodies of the deceased. He was obviously trying to take it all in, but it was a shock for him. 

‘Why surround yourself with even more… horror and tragedy, after everything that's already happened?’

She pursed her lips in annoyance. Deep conversation was not what she was expecting from Malfoy tonight. She hadn’t even been expecting him, but she was sure as hell hoping he'd leave quietly and they'd never speak of it again. Drunken wizards she was used to; drunken ex-enemy wizards who never liked her in the first place put her in a beyond awkward position. 

She really had been sure he'd be embarrassed enough to dart out the door when her back was turned. The fact the hadn't scurried away yet meant this visit was planned, and the answer as to why was a mystery she was sure that even with the full backing of the Investigation Department she wouldn't get to quickly if she played the aggressor. 

Once again, Hermione sighed. If she wanted to get any part of her evening back then, she was going to have to be the good cop. Great. She bent down and picked up the half-empty whiskey bottle from the floor.

‘I haven't had nearly enough to drink for this conversation,’ she said as she topped off the latest glass she'd been nursing. After a moment's hesitation, she tipped some into Malfoy's cold tea. ‘Even if you have.’

‘Not there anymore. I do suppose that wasn't the smartest move.’

‘Showing up to a Marshalwitch's home, uninvited, in the middle of the night? No, not that smart. You're lucky to not be in St Mungo's.’

‘I'm glad you ask questions first, and spell later, then. You didn't, did you?’

‘Curse you? No. You passed out on your own.’

‘Ah.’

With that one syllable, Hermione got her first clue for why Malfoy was currently sitting, shoulders slouched over, on her sofa. Whatever his reason for being here, he didn't really want to be. There was a resistance, a hesitance, which required a decent amount of lubrication to actually show up. But it was apparent he hadn't planned on getting quite that belligerent. 

Interrogations like this could be easy, if done correctly. They were practically therapy sessions: let the subject talk of his own accord and he'd never stop. Hermione was never quite as good at the soft approach as Harry was, though. There was a balance between appearing genuinely interested and not asking too many questions that she had never fully mastered. She liked to get the facts straight, gather as much information as possible, and she was a piss-poor actress. If Hermione didn't care about the wizard in front of her, she couldn't feign it. 

And she definitely didn't care about Malfoy. 

She had tried that before. Hermione had lobbied to get the Malfoys' sentences commuted, coordinated a wand exchange, and even defended their post-war actions in _The Prophet_. All to no avail. She never received even so much as a head nod in acknowledgement. 

But Hermione hadn't joined the Department of Magical Law Enforcement to be thanked and praised. She wanted to help build a better society, and that happened by helping one wizard at a time. 

So she fell back to the standard Reeve-in-training protocol: when in doubt, stay quiet. 

Minutes passed to nearly a quarter of an hour of silence. Hermione continued to nurse her whiskey and Malfoy stared endlessly into his cup of tea. She saw his fingers start to twitch around the porcelain, and she knew he was getting ready to talk. 

‘I meant what I'm guessing I said before I…’ 

Collapsed? Fainted? He was struggling for a word that didn't demean him. Characteristic shame, possible denial. Useful.

Then Malfoy finally did what she had been waiting for: He downed his tea, whiskey and all. He was ready. 

‘You're a Muggle-born witch, but you've been in the wizarding world for most of your life now. What's that like? Do you feel…different than those around you? Your boyfriend is—’

‘—ex.’ 

Malfoy finally looked up at her with a surprised, but smug, look on his face. She could have hexed herself. Never interject, let the subject get the story off his chest, and never make it personal. 

‘Ex-boyfriend.’ Now keep your mouth shut, Reeve.

‘Right. Well,’ Malfoy was struggling to get back on track. He needed a nudge, so Hermione filled his tea cup with whiskey. She put the bottle down on the coffee table within his reach. He took a deep breath, a swig of alcohol, and kept going.

‘Your ex-boyfriend is a pure-blood. Grew up in the wizarding world from birth. Did you not relate to him? Is that why you broke up?’

So much for not making it personal, but she had to answer the question. 

‘No, that had nothing to do with it. Ron was a git. Our backgrounds didn't have any bearing on our relationship,’ Hermione said as she sat down in the armchair next to the sofa. ‘Me being a Muggle-born didn't matter to him. We grew apart just like anyone else can. We realised that we didn't want the same things anymore.’

‘But don't you feel different, being Muggle-born? Don't you find that you are at a disadvantage? That you don't understand?’

Hermione furrowed her brows. She wasn't sure how to answer his questions, or why he was even asking them. 

‘Disadvantaged? Different? No. I grew up with different things, in a different way, of course. But I don't feel different. If anything, being part of the wizarding society seems normal. It’s going back to my childhood home, to my parent's world, that feels different now. You said it earlier: I've been in the wizarding world for more time now than I had ever spent out of it as a child. 

‘While I'll admit there might have been some things that I didn't understand at first—superstitions and bedtime stories—it's been a long time since there was a common, everyday concept that I didn’t inherently comprehend. It just took some time to acclimate to the cultural differences.’

‘Do we do things so different from Muggles?’

‘On the whole, no. I would just say Wizards do things the way Muggles used to. The wizarding world is roughly equivalent to the mid- to late-19th century in Muggle society. Minus the Industrial Revolution, I'd say.’

‘So you're saying they're better than we are?’

‘I didn't say that. But Muggles evolved; they had to. They found ways to do things without magic that wizards had been able to do for ages. Electricity is a response to Conjuring fire, telephones are a response to the Floo, science a response to our magical control.’

‘But they have all those problems. Murders and wars! Political and financial instability!’ 

Malfoy raised his voice for the first time, finally sounding as if he wasn't reciting a planned series of questions. Agitation, frustration. He didn’t like her answers, but he was trying to cover it up by topping off his cup.

‘And we don't? You know just as well as I do that the inflation of Galleon is decimating our fiscal relationship with America. I'm also ignoring your comment on wars and murders,’ Hermione said. 

She held out her glass for him to pour her another drink. He did, and then brought the nearly empty bottle to his lips and drank the rest of it down. He was slowing down, losing focus. She had to ask a question, get him to lead the conversation again.

‘Why are you suddenly so interested in Muggle-borns, Malfoy?’

There was a pause, a seizing of his body, ever so slight. But Hermione's trained Investigator eyes saw it nonetheless. The way his hand tightened around the neck of the bottle, how he stopped his inhale mid-breath. She'd found the heart of the issue, why he was really here. She'd have to file this interrogation technique away for future use; it proved to be rather effective, despite being against regulations to be drinking on the job. 

‘I think I might be one.’


	2. Development: Follow-up Investigation

Whatever Hermione had been expecting Malfoy to say, of all the possible reasons he could have given for why he had shown up at her house on that dreary night, drenched and drunk, that wouldn't have been one she could have deduced. 

Hermione Granger, Investigator Chief Marshalwitch for the Investigation Department of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, was one of the best. Only three Aurors, Harry Potter himself included, had a better case-closure rate than she.

Malfoy. Draco Malfoy--a Muggle-born? Of all the unimaginable…She doubted even Sherlock Holmes or Bruce Wayne would have seen that one coming. 

Hermione loved a twist, though. 

So her living room was converted into a command centre. 

Rolls of centuries-old parchments were organised by generation, tucked into the different shelves of her china cabinet. Handwritten, dragonhide-bound journals were stacked on the coffee table and on the armchair. Decaying copies of _The Wiltshire Chronicle_ and _The Prophet_ dating back to 1542 were strewn across the floor. A box of photographs sat on the edge of the sofa, and history books, both magical and Muggle, were piled along the walls.

For the fifth time that morning, Hermione picked up a piece of paper from the coffee table and stared at it, recounting how it had even come to be in her house. 

It had started with this crumpled up, waterlogged flyer. One that Malfoy would have never known existed, never looked at, never picked up, except that for one rainy day in Muggle London when he had forgotten an umbrella. Impervius was out of the question on the crowded streets. So he had done the next best thing: he grabbed a newspaper to hold over his head. It was filled with Muggle hogwash that he didn't care about, wouldn’t have ever paid attention to, but when he tossed the wet mess in the rubbish bin the insert flyers fell out.

One flyer he couldn’t pull his eyes away from, he had said. It had ‘Have you seen me? I’m still missing’ in big, bold type across the top, and a telephone number and case ID number on the bottom. But it was the non-moving picture of a little boy, 10 months old, and a rendering of what that boy would look like 25 years later that had caught his attention.

Hermione didn't have anything to say when he handed the flyer to her on the night he showed up at her door. At first, she had been more struck by the deep crease lines in the piece of paper, like it had been folded in his pocket for a longer time than he’d ever admit. But then she took in the picture of the 25-year-old abductee, and it was too similar to the man that was sitting across from her. 

At first she had tried to explain how it was an estimation, a guess at best, but she ended up lecturing him on computers, age-progression software, and Muggle technology. He just sat their nodding his head in agreement as if he had heard it all before.

Then he had pulled out a baby picture.

It was a moving, typical wizard photograph of a small-for-his-age infant sitting on his father's knee, bouncing up and down. Lucius Malfoy's head was out of frame, the focus was clearly on the child, a young Draco, but it was the bright, orange object at the wizard's feet that made her force back a gasp: the same plastic train was in the hands of the baby on the flyer.

‘Minus the Industrial Revolution.’ Wizards don't use plastic. 

It was at that point Hermione realised Malfoy had appeared drunk at her door not just because she was likely the only Muggle-born he had any semblance of a connection to, but because he needed her help. 

And she offered it to him. 

She wasn't about to send him away, adversary or not. Harry had always said she had a weakness for the downtrodden, the outcasts and the underdogs, but she wasn't willing to see this as another hopeless case. Not yet. She was an Investigator for the Ministry of Magic, so she would do what she did best. 

That meant for over a week Hermione had been pouring through every childhood memory, every reference to Malfoy in the Ministry’s ancestry archives, every family letter she could get her hands on. Investigator Chief Marshalwitch Hermione Granger was on the case.

Plus, with 43 days left before she could go back to work, suspension would have been boring otherwise. It wasn’t as if she could investigate the cold cases further without her Commander slapping her wrist, anyway. At least Marshalwizard Fernsby closed the Edevane family case after she owled him a few suggestions. The rest of the Investigation Department’s unsolved homicide files were tucked away under her bed, hardly as germane as the investigation that had exploded in her living room. 

Oh yeah, the rational was definitely coming back. Absolutely. Dive into work whilst on your ‘vacation’, Hermione. That’s properly rational. 

But they had made progress. After spending two days interviewing Malfoy for every detail on his childhood he could possibly remember, Hermione had decided that before they could analyse the evidence, she had to authenticate the crime. 

And that meant she needed to call in some favours. 

Hermione had called by Floo on an acquaintance in Muggle Liaison Office that she hoped hadn’t yet heard of her suspension: Marigold Chatfield-Hamilton was usually too engrossed in celebrity news of _Hello!_ or _The Sun_ to pay much attention to goings-on of Ministry gossip. Hermione assured her that the case files she needed from Scotland Yard were of vital importance to a key Auror Department case, and then forced herself to listen to Marigold prattle on for ten minutes about some group called the Spice Girls, just to make so she could ensure the request was labelled urgent rush.

The next favour took greater preparation. 

The babies may have looked identical, and the link between the pictures appeared more than coincidental, but there was no certainty that it was Malfoy in both photographs. Without the original case report and DNA results, there was no way to tell if the wizard was the same as the Muggle boy, but she could test to see if the man was actually a Malfoy. 

Hermione had asked him if there was any way to get a blood sample from his parents. Without a reply, Malfoy had Apparated on the spot and returned with a book moments later. 

‘Would this work instead?’ he had asked. ‘It’s the Malfoy grimoire.’

Hermione’s eyes had opened wide. The tome was old, covered in Occamy-skin with unicorn-hair binding, and it buzzed with magic in her hands. It was amazing, but Hermione wasn’t sure how it would help, until Malfoy opened it to the middle, and she saw the pages were soaked in still moist blood. 

‘It’s some ancestor’s, I could never figure out why it stayed wet.’

She swallowed her shock and hid it from Malfoy, but she had known that it was very Dark magic. A bastardization of life everlasting: if the blood never dried, then some fragment of the person from which it came would never die. Horocrux-Lite, Hermione had thought, as Malfoy Conjured a vial and siphoned off some of the blood from the page with his wand. When he finished, the remaining blood still floating in the air snapped back to the book like a rubber band, and the pages rippled like a pool of liquid.

Malfoy had raised an eyebrow in concern, and Hermione slammed the book shut.

‘Your turn. Arm, please.’

That evening, she travelled by Floo to call in her second favour.

‘Should I even ask?’ Dennis Creevey had said her when she brought in the two vials for examination at St Mungo’s Forensic Alchemy Laboratory. Hermione had just shook her head and tapped the side of her nose. 

‘Just the usual genealogical comparison. No case number.’

Dennis had promised the results as soon as possible, but the blood work wouldn’t be enough. Hermione need more information to continue to gather evidence and pursue leads if she was ever going to create an accurate timeline. 

Malfoy had been eager to help, and he made a surprisingly efficient research assistant. He brought her armfuls of documents: his great-grandfather Septimus’ treatise on Ministry politics, his ancestors Brutus’ complete writings for _Warlock at War_ , and the original Malfoy coat of arms bestowed by King William I. 

Most useful, however, was an omnibus containing eleven generations of pedigree charts, one for every Malfoy child, Draco Malfoy included. Folding out from the back, as intricately as Harry’s Marauder’s Map, was a descendancy tree originating with the first English Malfoy: Armand. While the document was impressive itself, it was the changes in the documents that drew Hermione’s eye most. 

Malfoy’s own pedigree chart was on the wrong page according to the descendency chart and index. The wrong numbering might not have been so conspicuous by itself, but all of the Malfoy pedigree charts were written in deep green indelible ink that she was nearly positive was dragon’s blood. Draco Malfoy’s was scripted in both black and green, as if something had been amended or rewritten.

But there was no record of any changes, and nothing in Malfoy’s memory that could explain such alterations. It was just another question.

After recounting the last week in her head, reviewing their progress, Hermione put the well-worn flyer back down on the coffee table.

Struck by a thought, she moved to look at the descendency chart that Malfoy had removed from the family history omnibus and charmed it to the wall. There was also something about the branching around Lucius Malfoy’s namesake from the 1600s that she couldn’t explain. 

‘I’m back. I’ve got supper,’ said Malfoy as he walked in the door. Hermione was so caught up in investigating the chart that she willingly ignored that he sounded entirely too familiar and comfortable saying that. ‘Did you know the shop around the corner claims to make the best chips in all of—’

‘They’re actually quite good, but come here a moment. I have a question about this,’ she said, pointing to the smudging around ‘Lucius Malfoy, (b. 1521 – d. 1642)’. Still inspecting the chart, she heard Malfoy set down the food parcel in the kitchen and then come to stand behind her. 

‘Oh, that? It’s nothing.’

‘How do you know? It could be related, your father is named Lucius as well.’

‘Trust me, it’s nothing to do with my father in any way. My father would never have considered it, not even for that whatshername, the dead Muggle princess.’

Somewhere in the last ten days, Hermione had become accustomed to Malfoy-speak. While he was far from fluent in Muggle affairs, he at least had a better grasp on it than Ron ever did. If she was interpreting correctly, and she was sure she was, Malfoy was talking about the late Princess Diana. But how that had any relevance she wasn’t sure. 

Luckily, somewhere in the last ten days, Malfoy had become accustomed to Granger-ese, as well. So when she followed him into the kitchen, put her hand on her hip and blinked at him, he understood that his answer wasn’t good enough. 

‘Sorry, right. It’s a bit of a family secret,’ he said, as he handed her the fish and chips he’d picked up. ‘Great-great-great-great-gra—’ 

‘There’s another “great” in there, you know.’

‘Well, however many it is. Lucius, my ancestor, he may have hexed that Muggle Queen, Elizabeth? Was that her name?’

‘Queen Elizabeth the First? You’re joking.’

‘I’m really not,’ said Malfoy. He grabbed the vinegar from the cupboard and sat down at the dining table. ‘The story goes that great-great-whatever-grandfather Lucius fancied the Muggle Queen. He courted her, but was told to sod off.’

‘I highly doubt the Queen of England told anyone to “sod off”,’ Hermione laughed, sitting next to Malfoy. 

‘Not in such few words, no, probably not. But the family legend goes that Lucius jinxed her so as to never get married but that he’d done it purely out of anger, because he had been expecting her to say yes to his proposal. When he tried to go and win her back a year or so later, he’d hexed her so properly he couldn’t undo it. So they had to take her off the family tree.’

Hermione stopped, a chip halfway in her mouth, and started laughing. 

‘The Malfoys made The Virgin Queen! Of course, why not! And I’m sure your family single-handedly built up Canary Wharf, too.’

‘No, not single-handedly. Grandfather Abraxas and my father were backers of Barclays moving there. But investments in the Muggle financial sector go back at least three centuries,’ he said matter-of-factly before popping a few chips in his mouth.

Hermione started to roll her eyes and then stopped and stared at the ceiling. There was something in that, a clue. What was it?

‘Your family is involved in the Muggle economy? But they despise Muggles.’

‘But Malfoys love money,’ he said with a grimace. ‘It’s a surprisingly lucrative endeavour. And we’re not violating the Statute of Secrecy so long as we play by the Muggles’ rules.’

An owl rushed into the kitchen, the beating of its wings covering up Hermione’s scoff. She reached for the envelope and saw it was from St Mungo’s: the genealogy results. The blood from two specimens revealed an ancestral linkage, but there were sufficient discrepancies between them to raise questions about direct descendency. 

‘Well, that’s to be expected,’ Malfoy said after she handed him the findings. 

‘Of course, we get this all the time with pure-bloods cases, all the inter-marriage dilutes the genealogy. If we could get your parents’ blood it would be a better comparison.’

‘That’s not it. The Malfoys don’t adhere to the ridiculous inbreeding practice that idiotic pure-blood families do. We have quite a few half-bloods on the family tree. And Muggle relations by extension. The Malfoys have been in England for a very long time, we’re likely related to half the isle.’

Hermione had felt her mouth drop open at that news. Of all the families she would have picked to be sticklers the pure-blood only marriages, it would have been the Malfoys. 

‘The baby might just be some third cousin once removed of your grandfather then. Or the by-product of some affair. It mightn’t be you at all!’

‘Or it may be me! Is this evidence enough to stop investigating after everything you’ve seen so far?’

Hermione had bit her lip at that in consternation. It still didn’t sit right to her, and she knew something was off about the whole thing. She had considered the crime authenticated and at least worthy of further exploration over a week ago. Going back now would be a waste of time, and the mystery would go unsolved.

‘No, of course not. We keep digging. But why do you dismiss these results so easily? It does mean you’re related to wizards, for certain.’

‘There is a family... curse, I guess it would be considered today. The Malfoys must always have a male heir. Even the Muggle descendants I’d assume.’

‘What? You’re only just telling me this now?’

He didn’t respond, and just shoved half his fish in his mouth. 

‘Fine. I will pretend it just slipped your mind. Do you know the spell?’

‘Yes, it the inside cover of the grimoire.’

Hermione had wanted to take his word for it, she didn’t like having the book in her house, let alone her hands, but she magicked the book into the kitchen and read through the inscription just to be thorough. From the sound of it, Malfoy wives always bore a male child first. 

Which was entirely unhelpful. The likelihood that the genealogy breakdown was relevant to this case, then, was minuscule. Alchemical testing of blood was far less advanced than Muggle forensics. And if the curses had any fluidity to it, the magic could have been applied to any consort of a Malfoy by proxy, and every barmaid and wench from the 15th century would have born another male Malfoy. 

‘That’s it!’

Hermione jumped up from the table and ran back into the living room. She had already started leafing through stacks of old _Prophet_ newspapers when Malfoy followed her.

‘That’s what?’ he asked, kneeling across from her on the floor. His eyes were wide with anticipation. 

‘The Statute of Secrecy.’

Malfoy huffed. ‘What about it?’

‘Signed in 1689, established as a worldwide doctrine by the International Confederation of Wizards in 1692—‘

‘I did get a N.E.W.T. in History of Magic, as well, Granger.’ 

He was exasperated, and, when Hermione looked at him closer, scared. He had been covering it well over the past few days, acting as if their investigation were soothing his nerves. But she knew it was eating him inside, that he was doing all he could to disassociate and appear calm

‘Right, what I mean is,’ Hermione said, putting a hand on his shoulder to reassure him, ‘before the Statute, the Malfoys, well, they seemed to cavort with Muggles, didn’t they? Courting royalty, getting started in Muggle business. But it all seems like this was prior to the Statute of Secrecy being accepted. After the Statute was passed, well, their attitudes changed.’

‘Alright, so you think there’s a link with the Statute and my… situation?’

Hermione heard his voice crack, but she pretended she didn’t notice.

‘I don’t know, but the prevailing theory is that Muggle-born witches and wizards are not anomalies, but descendants of forgotten wizarding lineages. Potentially even Squibs. If the Malfoys had a relationship with Muggles in the past, and not just half-bloods, we could try and trace the other lineages, the non-magical descendants, instead of just those on the charts.’

She gave his shoulder a squeeze, and handed him a stack of newspapers. ‘Help me go through these _Prophets_. Set aside any one that you see “Malfoy” in, alright? Obituaries, marriage announcements, births.’

There were no coincidences in investigations, and there were still too many questions to be answered. She had the what, the where, and the when identified; Even, potentially, the who. It was the why and how she had to solve. And those were the biggest questions. But at least they had a lead.

*****

‘I’ve got it!’

Hermione rushed through the front door, her nose in a file, and threw her bag into the corner. She heard Malfoy come hurrying in, but her eyes were still glued to the report.

‘You have it? You really—’

‘Yes! I just—Malfoy! Put some clothes on!’

Mafloy was standing in the doorway to her bedroom, holding a towel up around his waist in one had, a wand to his half-shaven face in the other. At least he had the decency to blush before running back to the washroom.

But Hermione couldn’t help but smirk a bit. She had seen the first real smile on Malfoy’s face since he first showed up on her doorstep. Still, that didn’t quite compensate for the nearly-naked surprise. 

Good to know that waxing spell she had been thinking of using a few weeks ago wouldn’t have made much of a difference, though.

And now she was blushing. 

Bloody hell, Hermione. No fraternizing with the victim. Thirty-five days left of her suspension, and Hermione was starting to think rational thought had left her forever.

By the time Malfoy came back to the living room moments later, fully clothed, Hermione had forced herself to read through the entire preliminary investigation report twice to get the thought of a naked, hairless Malfoy out of her head. 

‘What does it say?’

Hermione took a deep breath, and looked at the eager, anxious man across from her. This was not going to be easy. She turned to look at the blackboard they had set up in the corner of her living room. It listed out every major Muggle link the Malfoy family had.

‘It’s not there, is it?’

She spun around to look at Malfoy again, her brows furrowed in trepidation.

‘No. It doesn’t fit any of the direct connections we had hoped for, but here. Look.’

Hermione opened the folder and spread the files out over the coffee table: incident reports, witness statements, victim interviews, medical records, physical evidence analysis, canvassing and search logs, and leads lists ten-pages long. 

‘Metropolitan Police case #IA70342. The non-parental abduction of Andrew Thomas.’

‘Andrew Thomas,’ he said in a whisper, with an almost reverent tone.

Hermione watched as Malfoy picked up the Muggle photo from the file. It was a different one than on the flyer, showing a small, blond baby in a woman’s arms, her face out of frame.

‘Last known witness was the mother, Joanne Thomas. “Witness states her body suddenly seized and became paralyzed, unable to move anything but her eyes. She fell to the ground, and when she was able to move again she moved to the pram but he was no longer there.”’

She leafed through the other pages and picked up a stapled group of pages with a post-it note stuck to it, the crime lab report—‘biological evidence degraded’. Hermione sighed. The case was from 1979; what had she expected? And even if the evidence was still being stored, it wasn’t as if she would be able to get her hands on it without her bluerobes and badge. 

‘The interview is detailed, but it is difficult to interpret. The police didn’t ask the right questions, but it sounds like it could have been a Full Body-Bind Curse. There’s no way for knowing for sure from this record, though. A new interview would be best. Better would be to collect the memory, provided it’s not degraded too—’

‘I want to meet her.’

‘That is not open for discussion, Malfoy.’ 

He was still staring at the photo of the baby and its mother, and Hermione was worried at his desperation.

‘I am already crossing the line as it is. You’re lucky the Muggle Liaison Office loves me. These records were sodding hard to get my hands on. I’m violating at least twenty protocols having this case file, let alone showing it to you.’

‘This could be…this could have been…’

Hermione stood up and sat down next to him. The photo was still in his hands, shaking. He was trembling. He was scared.

‘Malfoy.’ He didn’t look away from the photograph. ‘Draco,’ she said softly, putting her hands around his and pulling him to face her. ‘We’re not sure of that yet. For all we know, this could be some long-lost Malfoy cousin.’

‘But—’ He tried to pull away, but she held him in place. 

‘We know that Joanne Thomas was not on our list of Muggles with a connection to the Malfoy family. But we also now know that there could have been magic involvement in the kidnapping of this little boy. That is bigger and more telling than our current theories.’ 

There was just no proof yet that the boy in the photograph was the same one sitting next to her. She knew he had good reason to want to be anyone other than a Malfoy, but the pieces weren’t all there, not yet. 

But there was something: where was it?

Hermione dropped Malfoy’s hands and rifled through the case file on the table. She had seen it, she knew she had. How had it taken her so long to notice?

‘Let me see your arm. Right arm.’

Malfoy looked at her, confused, but held out his arm anyway. She grabbed her wand off the table, and put the sheet of paper she had found on her lap. Looking from the page to Malfoy’s arm in front of her, she started muttering under her breath as she moved her wand up his arm.

‘What is it? Granger?’

As he asked his question, he watched as a faint purple light glowed around his forearm. 

‘Did you ever break your arm, Mafloy?’

Hermione looked up to him as the purple faded away, along with the colour in his face as he shook his head. 

‘Andrew Thomas did.’


	3. Disclosure: Arrest and Prosecution

She heard him cry out, and without a second thought Hermione rushed into the bathroom. She thought he might have fallen, been attacked by Crookshanks maybe, but when she pushed back the shower curtain, Hermione hadn't considered that he might, in fact, be crying. 

He had put up such a strong front lately. After all that they'd uncovered, and all the uncertainty that remained, she hadn't really seen Malfoy be anything other than accepting, determined to find out who he was. He was keeping such a level head, Hermione had almost forgotten how devastated he would be.

Staring down at the crumpled, shivering, sobbing man at her feet, Hermione knew Malfoy had realised that his world and his understanding of who he was had shattered around him. He had finally acknowledged that his whole life might be a lie.

Denial had been holding him together, and Hermione empathized, heartbroken, remembering how that felt and how all she wanted was for people to stop telling her everything was going to be okay. 

So, saying nothing, she set her wand down, climbed into the basin, and pulled him into her arms. 

He clearly had not noticed her presence until she touched him. Malfoy’s body tensed and a sob was strangled in his throat. But Hermione didn’t let go. She held him until he relaxed against her and until she could feel cool tears—not the hot water from the overhead shower—falling into her lap. 

Hermione let him cry silently, slowly rubbing her thumb up and down the nape of his neck when he started trembling. She ignored how her clothes began to cling to her, his elbow digging into her thigh, and only moved when he did. As Malfoy turned his head to look up at her, Hermione pushed his wet hair out of his face and looked straight into his bloodshot eyes.

‘I’m not going to tell you everything will be all right. I can’t promise you that, I’m sorry.’

And then he kissed her. 

Malfoy’s mouth crashed into hers, and before she could process it, Hermione responded. She arched her back towards him as he shoved his hands under her tank top to grab her waist, and opened her mouth to kiss him back.

‘Wait. Wait!’ Hermione panted. She pushed away from Malfoy and let her head fall back against the cold tile. ‘This is a bad idea.’

‘I know,’ he said, laying his forehead against her bare breastbone. She could feel his breath on her skin, and she was sure it wasn’t helping.

‘You’re in shock. You’re hurting.’

‘I need this.’ He kissed her breastbone as he rubbed his thumbs up and down along her ribcage, brushing along the underside of her breasts. ‘I need…something familiar.’

‘But this—‘

‘Please, Granger.’ He looked into her eyes again, and Hermione knew she couldn’t say no, even if she thought it was a bad idea. 

So she kissed him. 

Hermione came to her knees and, with a hand on either side of his face, she opened her mouth to him. She felt more than heard his groan. His hands were back underneath her top, raking down her back as he pulled himself up against her.

She broke away from him to breathe and kissed his forehead. ‘If this is what you need…’ Hermione whispered. 

‘Yes.’

Her top and bra were off in moments, and Malfoy had her pinned back against the cold tiles. He ran his tongue along her neck, up to just below her ear, and despite the heat from the shower, from his chest against hers, she shivered.

‘Thank you,’ he said against her ear, before biting the lobe. 

He grabbed, massaged, her breast with one hand, and the other slid down into her pants. Hermione gasped as his fingers brushed over her clit, and slowly moved further back. He pressed a finger into her, just barely dipping it in to her wetness, before he hooked his thumb around her leggings and pushed them, with her knickers, down around her bum. 

She felt his growing cock against her thigh and, using Malfoy’s temporary distraction with her leggings, she took him in her hand and stroked. His eyes closed in pleasure as Hermione kissed him again, and kept moving her hand along his shaft. 

One finger entered her, followed quickly by a second, pushing into her at the same time her hand reached the base of his cock. She gasped into his mouth as Malfoy’s hand mimicked that of her own. With her free hand, he pulled her leg free of her clothing and brought it around his waist. 

They stayed flush, chest-to-chest, pleasuring each other. Threading her hand into his hair, Hermione deepened the kiss and swirled her tongue around his. She bit and sucked on his bottom lip as she moved back for air.

Malfoy growled and pulled his fingers out of her. Grabbing her thighs, he stood up and pressed her back against the wall, clasping Hermione’s legs around her waist. He attacked her mouth again, moving his lips against hers relentlessly, and burried his cock inside of her.

Her hands clawed at his scalp, neck, shoulders, back, as she arched her hips towards the penetration. Hermione whimpered.

‘Granger?’ he asked, after moving his face back an inch to look at her, his breath humid against her face in the hot shower.

Hermione smiled. He was making sure she was all right. Sweet. 

‘Don’t stop now.’

She hadn’t realised she had said that out loud until she saw him smirk. Maddeningly slowly at first, he slid in and out. Hermione bucked her hips against him and tightened her legs around his waist, drawing him all the way in. 

A deep grumble came from the back of his throat as Malfoy closed his eyes, and he bent his head, touching their foreheads together. Hermione sighed at the closeness and the pressure of all of him inside her. 

‘You won’t break me,’ she whispered, as she slicked his hair back.

Immediately, he pulled her fingers out of his hair and crushed them against the wall above her head. Holding her wrists in place with one hand, his other curled around her back to her hip, he started driving into her. 

Hermione cried out, and she could have sworn she felt him smirk against her neck as he was gnawing, sucking, teasing the spot below her ear that he’d found. She pushed all but her shoulders off the wall and met him for every thrust, pushing, forcing him deeper inside.

‘Oh, yes! Dra—‘

His mouth was on hers again, and both of his hands moved to her hips. She clutched his shoulders as he lifted her up to the tip and then brought her all the way back down his length. And he didn't stop. He kept bouncing her up and down, so quickly, Hermione couldn’t focus on anything other than the movement, not even kissing him. 

She broke away from his mouth and flung her arms around his neck. Gasping for breath, she stuttered out pleas for him to not stop, to keep moving inside her.

‘Come for me, Granger,’ he said, his eyes boring into hers while his cock did the same. ‘Please.’

And she did. Harder than she though she would, could, her body seized and she felt her limbs grab around him even tighter. The orgasm that she hadn’t even noticed building ripped through her. She dug her nails into his back, her heels into his arse. Hermione screamed in pleasure. 

She felt herself pulsing around his cock, but he didn’t stop thrusting. Malfoy kept his hands on her hips and kept pounding every inch of himself into her vagina. Even as the crest of the ecstasy started to fall, Hermione felt it start to creep back. Her fingertips started to go numb, her toes curled and her veins were throbbing with fire.

His hands clenched harder around her hipbones, and he slammed into her even faster, and, if possible, deeper. 

‘Oh, god, Grang—‘

Malfoy moaned, but Hermione cut him off, swallowing her own name from his mouth. The tip of his cock brushed her cervix on his last thrust and he held himself still as they came together. Their bodies froze, taut, until Hermione finished the kiss. Their bodies convulsed slightly in the aftereffects.

They stayed there, Malfoy holding her up against the shower wall, catching their breath. He pulled her close to him and gingerly knelt back down to the bottom of the bathtub, before collapsing against her breastbone again.

Hermione held him and ran her fingers through his hair again. She noticed his back was red. From her scratches or the scalding water, she wasn’t sure. With her toes, she turned off the hot water and left the cold on to cool them down.

Within moments, she heard Malfoy’s snores. 

***

Hermione stood in the doorway, watching Malfoy sleep in her bed, unwilling to wake him.

When he had rolled over last night and pulled her close to him to cuddle, he’d asked if she would go interview Joanne Thomas the next morning. In a moment of weakness she had agreed, but she hadn’t anticipated being unable to fulfil his request. 

After visiting the updated address from the case notes for the Thomas family, Hermione knew it was a dead-end and that no decent information could from further interviews. All she had found at the Thomas’ address was Murray Thomas, the father and husband. A quick, three-question interrogation told her all she needed to know: someone was covering up loose ends.

Joanne Thomas had died nearly two months after the abduction of her son. The on-scene PCs had ruled it a suicide, ignoring the trace evidence that even the husband had noticed: the look of fear on her face, the oddly tied knot that she had hanged herself with, and that there was no chair or stool near her. 

Unfortunately, from Murray Thomas’ answer to question number two, the case had been closed, her body cremated and he had done his best to move on. The recycling bin full of empty litre bottles told her otherwise, but Hermione accepted his response. 

If Joanne Thomas, née Volant, was ever a distant descendent of the Malfoy family, there was now hardly any way to investigate. Murray Thomas had declined to provide a specimen to keep on file, and without her badge and wand privileges, Hermione couldn’t make him without a Wizengamot hearing. 

She didn’t want to wake him, though. Whilst Malfoy slept in her bed, he didn’t look as if the earth had just fallen out from beneath him. He looked, not at peace, but at least alive.

But she had to wake him. 

Unable to do so without at least softening the blow, Hermione started cooking breakfast, hoping he would wake up to the smell of ham and eggs. He did, and only once he’d had a cup of coffee did she explain the dilemma.

She watched as he stared at the food sizzling in the pan on her stove. His eyes were more vacant than she had seen since the first night he showed up at her door. Thirty days later and, though she was more than accustomed to his presence, she couldn’t help but feel like she was intruding on his personal space.

‘I can’t, I can’t keep things straight any more. I don’t know what to think. I just…’ 

She saw him fraying. And she knew this time a hug, even sex, wasn’t going to be enough. Hermione pulled the pan off the burner and dropped it, food and all, into the sink. She took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes in earnest. 

‘You need a Pensieve. You need to sort out your thoughts. I’m sorry, I don’t have one.’

‘They do.’

Hermione had been waiting for that: the moment that Malfoy started associating ‘them’ and him as separate Malfoy entities. 

‘Back at the Manor?’

He shook his head, at first, and then nodded.

‘We’ll have to go there first, in order to get to it.’

There was something he wasn’t saying, something he was holding back. For the first time, Hermione was concerned that there was something she was missing that wasn’t just a clue. Her Investigator gut churned in agony, but she ignored it. 

‘Then let’s go.’

Malfoy’s hands grabbed hers so tightly they turned white from the lack of blood flow.

‘This isn’t going to be pretty, Granger. Don’t let go of my hands.’

Hermione felt herself squeezed through the space between her house and Malfoy Manor through Side-Along Apparition. The layers of protection and curses fell aside as Malfoy Apparated them into the foyer of the Manor. She tired to shake off the feeling of something trying to pull her through the front doors behind her, but Malfoy put an arm around her shoulders, and the grasping feeling around her dissipated.

‘I, Draco Malfoy, welcome Hermione Granger to Malfoy Manor,’ he said loudly. His voice echoed off the marble halls of the foyer, and around the corner, a portrait scoffed. 

‘The house won’t try to kick me out now?’

‘No, you’ll be safe in the Manor. It’s where we’re going you’ll have to worry about.’

Hermione didn’t quite have time to process what that meant as a squeaky, tiny voice broke out from the shadows. 

‘Master Draco, sir, welcome home. The master and the mistress have been missing you, sir. Be you needing more books, sir? Bulgey would have been bringing them to you, sir, if you’d had asked.’

She looked up at Malfoy next to her and saw the colour drain from his face as his eyes darted around the room. He looked less comfortable to be here than she did. Then it hit her, and Hermione realised he hadn’t been the one supplying her with endless documents on the Malfoy family; Bulgey the house-elf had.

‘Bulgey’s been bringing you all of the documents and materials, hasn’t he? You haven’t been back home in over a month, have you?’

‘This is not my home anymore. Bulgey, take us to the chamber.’

‘Yes, Master Draco.’

The house-elf snapped his fingers, and Hermione was being squished through space and time again. She wasn’t about to stop, though. The git had been interfering in his own investigation.

‘So when you said I couldn’t interview your parents for my own safety, and because you wanted to be sure…’ Hermione growled, ignoring the surroundings of the new stone cavern she was in. The books, waterfall, altar and casket all went unnoticed as she stared at Malfoy intently.

‘I had interrogated them before I came to you, but they know nothing of this. They unequivocally believe I am their son. But there were… discrepancies. My mother remembered me being incredibly sick as an infant, but she couldn’t explain how I got better.’

‘That sounds like they were Obliviated.’

‘That’s what I thought. Using Legilimency I probed both of their minds. There were gaps of white space, almost a month of it in both, around the time.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’

‘I didn’t want to bias your investigation.’

‘So much for that. Now I need the Pensieve, too. This is a lot to process.’

‘It’s over here. It was my grandfather’s, we’re in his old laboratory.’

Malfoy led her over to the waterfall in the corner of the cavern and waved his wand over the shallow pool. Out of it rose a silver and gold Pensieve that floated in mid-air and hundreds of vials of memories, all labelled, on pedestals. On the closest pillar rested just one crystal bottle, which read ‘Draco-Andrew’.

‘Malfoy! This is it!’ 

Hermione opened the bottle of memories, but as she tipped the glass to pour the memories into the Pensieve, the silver strand shot away. 

‘Draco? Have you come home?’ Narcissa Malfoy’s voice rang out as soon as the crack of Apparition faded.

‘Oh!’ Narcissa Malfoy exhaled in a whisper as she looked around the chamber nervously. Her eyes settled on Malfoy, and tears welled up in her eyes. ‘My beautiful boy.’

‘Narcissa, stop!’ Lucius Malfoy grabbed his wife as she started to move toward Draco. ‘If we remember, that means he knows now, too.’

‘But he’ll understand. He’s my baby. All grown up, but still my baby.’ Narcissa turned her wide, wet eyes back to Draco and pleaded. ‘You came back to me, so I did it all for you, Draco. Don’t you see, it’s because Mummy loves you. She brought you back.’

‘M-Malfoy,’ Hermione said, grabbing Malfoy’s arm and pulling him to look at her. ‘These weren’t just memories catalogued for a Pensieve. It was _their_ memories. The white space you saw. Whatever it was they had forgotten, they remember now.’

‘Draco, come here.’ Lucius Malfoy’s voice cut across the strained silence. The elder Malfoy tapped his cane on the ground next to him to summon his son, but Hermione tightened her grip on his arm.

‘Malfoy, don’t. This isn’t your family. You aren’t biologically a Malfoy. You are Andrew Thomas. A Muggle-born, kidnapped as a baby and raised by a family of pure-blood wizards. I don’t know why, or what for, but you were right. You are the child from the flyer.’

‘But the blood work said I was related,’ he said, touching his arm where she had drawn the blood to be tested at St Mungo’s.

‘I know, but you said so yourself, it could be extremely distantly. Those results don’t mean you’re properly a Malfoy. Even if you were a Muggle-born wizard, entirely unrelated to the Malfoy family, your blood would probably show a relationship to any wizard sample.’

‘But it was my blood. Malfoy blood. I have it in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to be get in here, not without a Malfoy. If I hadn’t stopped it, the Manor would have destroyed you. Only Malfoy blood can command that.’

‘But you cannot’ve had pure Malfoy blood in you, the test wouldn’t have shown such a degree of discrepancy. I explained this to you before; a blood transfusion doesn’t make you someone else. Your body absorbs it and makes it your own, it doesn’t change your DNA—‘

Hermione’s voice caught in her throat, and she and her body went numb. 

But they couldn’t have. Transfiguration didn’t work that way, it couldn’t make someone into someone else. Only Polyjuice potion could make such an inside-out change, but it was temporary; a constant tonic at best. Anything as drastic as this would have been permanent, and nearly soul-destroying.

‘The Malfoys must always have a male heir.’ They wouldn’t have.

At that Hermione really was nearly sick. She gagged on her own gastric acid as images and descriptions of passages from books she had tried to forget she ever read came back to her. Horrible, grotesque spells, potions of incredibly dark proportions that could do nearly as much damage to a wizard’s soul as a Horcrux. 

How had she not seen this, predicted it, deduced the only possible answer beforehand? The man standing before her wasn’t one, but two: he was both Andrew Thomas and Draco Malfoy. He had been one child, transformed into another.

‘Homunculus.’ 

‘Yes, quite right, Miss Granger. No wonder you were the best in the year,’ Lucius said without his usual disdain. 

Hermione backed away as Lucius and Narcissa came to stand on either side of Malfoy. She could only stare in fear and disgust. Her mind reeled from the cruelness, and she only prayed that Malfoy would step away from them.

‘Why? What happened to Draco?’

‘My baby died!’ Narcissa screamed. ‘My only child, the only child I could ever have! My baby died. But then I found him again.’

She watched Malfoy jump out of his skin as his Narcissa caressed his head.

‘You were there, in your pram, with that little toy. You dropped it, Draco, you always were clumsy as a child, but you used your magic to bring it back to you. I knew then that that wicked Mudblood woman had stolen you from me. So I brought you home.’

Hermione felt the bile rise in her throat again. Narcissa Malfoy had kidnapped Andrew Thomas to replace her own dead child, and now she was pulling her victim towards her to hug.

‘But the blood…’

She didn’t want to ask, but she had to. Hermione saw Malfoy’s eyes glaze over, He was in shock, but he needed to hear it all. And then they needed to leave.

‘My father Abraxas’ idea; he couldn’t stand the idea of a Mudblood in the family. The Malfoys must always have a male heir, after all, and we were the last pure-blood lineage. You have the girmoire, you’ve seen the spell, haven’t you? Nasty piece of magic, but if gave us our son back.’

An anguished gasp escaped Hermione’s lips. The answer had been in front of her the whole time: the grimoire she refused to look at, the alterations to Malfoy’s pedigree chart.

‘And the Source?’

Lucius motioned to the casket up against the wall next to her. He clicked his cane against the stone floor again, and the lid opened. Hermione barely stifled a scream. 

Lying in the coffin was the husk of an infant, all moisture dawn out of it. The skin hanging off was flaky and leathered. The hair was platinum-blond and still growing, longer than the body. Its mouth was distorted, open, as if giving a final scream for attention.

‘Preserved, of course. We never had to bury him. Narcissa had been too distraught to tell anyone. We were quite lucky she brought back a wizard child, though. The magic might not have transferred properly even with the full blood replacement we did on the homunculus.

‘My father didn’t want anyone to know about it though, the scandal if it got out. So he killed the Muggle and Obliviated our memories to his Pensieve. Thank you for returning them to us. Abraxas may have thought we wouldn’t love him enough, but he’s our son. If anything this makes me love him even more.’

She had seen enough. She was going to go home, throw up, and then Hermione Granger was going to bring every Auror in the Ministry back to arrest the Malfoys.

‘Malf—Andrew, come on, we’re leaving.’

But he didn’t move. Lucius and Narcissa had a hand on either of his shoulders.

‘Andrew, let’s go. You are not a Malfoy, you are not Draco Malfoy. That is!’ Hermione implored, pointing at the decayed remains. 

‘I’m sorry, Granger. But I’m staying. It’s the only life I’ve ever known. Thank you for helping me figure out who I am.’

**Author's Note:**

> Originally part of the Hawthron & Vine Treasure Trope challenge.
> 
> Thank you UndeadGirl for such a fantastic prompt: Draco Malfoy as a Muggleborn and his parents cannot know. I might have cheated there at the end, but I hope you liked it anyway.
> 
> Huge hugs and love to the mods which allowed me extra time. Godsends, I say!


End file.
